PoshRocketeer

This feels like a shitpost but I honestly can't tell. Would be in favor with being able to add cosmetic acne, blemishes, and scars in the character creator though.

Yes, but this is not the issue I'm having. I'm having an issue with the hit registration of those ground attacks.

big graph hurt my brain brain

I don't really like this much. I'm not saying this couldn't be a good sandbox options for players who just really are not getting it, but a big part of learning the game is learning to interpret the information that you're seeing with your eyeballs, and hearing with your ears, and drawing your own conclusions and plan of action from there. I'm not saying I'm totally against HUD elements like this existing in games, for example I think Project Zomboid really should have a melee durability indicator on your toolbelt when you're holding that weapon in your hand because your character should reasonably be able to see what condition that weapon is in when they're holding it, but the devs don't agree. I am saying that this particular suggestion feels antithetical to the experience the game is trying to build.

While I usually agree that realism is not a substitute for game design, Project Zomboid aims to be a pretty grounded experience to an extent, and this frankly is not a nitpick I'd expect to hear from the average milsim boomer going "WeLl In ReAl LiFe". Yes, you CAN disable house alarms, but that's not what this suggestion is. He's not asking for house alarms to never be on, he's suggesting that maybe they should go out once the power goes out. I see that as a pretty solid line of reasoning, but good for the gameplay/immersion as well. House alarms going out after the power goes out is not only logical, but what I imagine most players would naturally assume until they see evidence to the contrary. Your dismissal of this suggestion kind of irks me /:

I'm gonna go ahead and guess the answer to that is emphatically "no". Zomboid doesn't seem like it would be much fun on mobile, nor would it even really be possible. This game can already make modern PCs cry.

Afaik you're pretty much spot on. You'll occasionally have a decent sized group cross into your area from meta events, but in general wandering hordes are non-existent, meaning that cells never get repopulated as hordes shed and pick up numbers, nor do they really migrate in any meaningful way. The devs have definitely expressed interest in improving the way the engine handles non player entities, mainly for NPCs but also for zomboids, so there's a very good chance we're going to eventually see wandering hordes and more complex migration, but we'll have to see

Items here are separated in case you want to discuss them separately. I spent a lot of time on this so I hope you enjoy. TL:DR Because that's a lot of reading: Infections cause pain and fever, infections can get worse or better depending on how the player treats it, first aid skill, traits, and a little bit of luck. If you don't treat the infection or are just really unlucky, it will get worse and spread, but isn't going to kill you if you're treating it properly. If you don't treat it, it will start to damage your player, and will do more damage if it spreads. You can stop it from dealing damage by treating it properly relative to its threat level, and heal it faster by treating it better than what is strictly necessary. You can use medicines and poultices to deal with symptoms and help them heal faster. You can use clean/sterilized rags and bandages to clean wounds to be at a slightly better chance of avoiding infection than if you hadn't cleaned them at all, but not as well as if you had sterilized them with alcohol, wipes, or disinfectants. This not only adds a few new features to First Aid that make it much more important and useful overall, especially in a group of survivors that lack it, but makes dealing with wounds much more engaging and risky, so that even when transmission is off there is a real threat in dealing with wound infections that may alter the course of your character's story, but isn't super likely to kill you if you know how to deal with it. Right now most wounds you can just slap a bandage on and forget about it, and even if infections made them heal slower the same would likely be true. Main Text: Right now in the live game, infections do literally nothing at all, I'm fairly certain this is a bug, but even when they did they weren't particularly engaging or threatening, and didn't even really need to be treated. I propose a system that will give them a little more depth and urgency, but also make First Aid significantly more useful of a skill to have. 1) Infections can occur with exposure to open air, dirty bandages, infrequently with unsterilized bandages, and almost never with sterilized bandages. Higher first aid reduces chance of wound infections while the wounds are tended to, and wounds being cared for with higher First Aid will become infected slower once the bandage becomes dirty. Infected wounds heal much slower than non-infected wounds. 1A) Higher First Aid skills allows for better treatment of infections, making them more likely to heal quickly and less likely to progress. Applications of poultices and similar treatments also improve with First Aid skills. 1B) Relevant poultices already found in-game can be applied to infections to make them heal quicker, reduce pain and fever, etc. 2) Larger wounds (Lacerations, deep wounds) are more likely to get infected, and those infections are more likely to be more dangerous. All infections can progress to a more severe type of infection, or can regress to a less severe type of infection depending on how well they're being treated, whether or not the player is taking antibiotics, etc. 3) Infections can have 3 characteristics. Mild, Severe, Deadly. Mild infections cause a bit of pain in the area where they occur, and aren't likely to progress if the wound is cared for. Severe infections cause more pain and progress more quickly, with a noticeable chance to spread through a limb. Deadly infections always cause agony, spread MUCH more quickly and can kill in as little as 3 days if untreated or treated poorly, usually requiring several doses of antibiotics, occurring much more frequently from large wounds like Lacerations, Deep Lacerations, and Bites (assuming that transmission is turned off) unless you're especially lucky and have the traits necessary to pull through (resilient, fast healer, etc). 3A) Characters with low first aid skill can try to identify the severity of an infection, but are not likely to be able to tell the difference. Players can attempt to identify infected wounds every 12 hours. Players with low First Aid skill will more often than not have to make do with judging based off of the symptoms. At level 2 First Aid, wounds will immediately be tagged as "Infected" when they occur, and at level 5 First Aid you will always be able to identify the type of infection on first try. (no check failures) At First Aid level 7, you never have to check infections manually to determine what level of infection they are, and you will get more accurate information on how not only the infection is doing, but all wounds in general. Characters with NO (0) First Aid skill will not be able to tell that the wound is infected at all, with the exception of Deadly Infections which will always display the "Infected" status when they occur at low levels of First Aid. This means players with no First Aid skill will have to pay close attention to their moodles, and watch for the "Pain" tag to appear or watch their body temp. This also means that as such, their characters will not be able to apply poultices for dealing with infection to wounds as their character does not know that the wound is infected, only being able to apply more generalized poultices for wound care. (Last part totally debatable) 3B) Characters will get loose guidance in the form of first-person text from the character when hovering over (confirmed) infected wounds, depending on their first aid level. They will also get some loose guidance when hovering over things like Antibiotics, if relevant. This system could also be applied to regular wound treatment, but this post is already very long as it is FIG 1: "I don't know what to do about this..." (Level 2 First Aid character hovering over a (confirmed) infected wound.) FIG 2: "I need to clean the wound..." (Level 4 First Aid character hovering over a (confirmed) unidentified, Mild or Severe infected wound.) FIG 3: "I need to clean the wound, but sterilizing is better..." (Level 5+ First Aid character hovering over a (confirmed) Mild infected wound) FIG 4: "I need to keep this as clean as possible, I should sterilize the wound and any bandages..." (Level 5+ First Aid character hovering over a (confirmed) Severe infected wound.) FIG 5: "I really should sterilize this, but cleaning it should do for now..." (Level 5+ First Aid character hovering over the "Clean wound" (as opposed to Sterilize wound) option over an uninfected wound, Mild infected wound, or Severe infected wound. Severe infected wound gets "if my supplies are sterile..." added to the end of its blurb) FIG 6: "This infection is going to kill me, I need antibiotics, antiseptic, and sterilized bandages..." (Level 5+ First Aid character hovering over Deadly infected wound) FIG 7: (Normal antibiotics description followed by:) "Can treat mild infections on their own, greatly assist in the treatment of more severe infections, are absolutely necessary in treating deadly infections. Continue treatment until bottle is empty, even after symptoms have cleared." (First Aid 4+ Character hovering over antibiotics in the inventory.) These are the basic examples, more can be added to pad the "in-between" states as well as encompass more medical items and wounds. 4) All infections cause both localized and generalized body temp increases, localized pain to the infection and the surrounding areas, more pain when using the area that they're localized to, and can cause sickness/fever if severe enough. 5) Severe and Deadly infections can begin to spread through limbs (mentioned above), once this has happened they require antibiotics to treat, Deadly infections almost always require antibiotics to heal. 6) Each infected region will roll for damage (and chance to spread) independently once per hour if the wound is untreated. For Deadly Infections to be considered "Treated", the player must be using antibiotics and caring for the (sterilized) wound with Sterilized bandages, for Mild wounds, simply tending to the (cleaned or sterilized) wound with clean bandages is enough to stop them from dealing damage. Alternatively, taking antibiotics and using unsterilized bandages (even with an unclean and unsterilized wound) will prevent Mild infections from dealing damage OR have a sterilized wound with unsterilized bandages. Severe infections can be treated by having at least a cleaned wound with a sterilized bandage. The wound must be at least clean when taking antibiotics to prevent Severe infections from damaging the player, but a sterilized bandage would not be necessary on antibiotics. Any excess conditions met will help the infection heal faster. This separation between the infections and their treatment minimums is designed to make them unpredictable enough to be engaging, but still allowing for some flexibility in treatment up until the most severe cases. 6A) If no tools for sterilizing a wound are available in the player's inventory or nearby containers, they can clean the wound with clean or sterilized rags/bandages. For mild/severe infections this is enough to be considered properly treated, but won't heal as fast as sterilized wounds. Deadly infections will have better rolls for damage if the wound is cleaned but not sterilized. 6B) The game will first roll to determine whether or not the player will take damage from that infected wound, based on the factors listed above, the player's First Aid skill, as well as traits like Resilient/Prone to Illness. If the wound is actively being properly treated by conditions listed above, this roll will always be in the player's favor. If the roll is not in the player's favor, it will roll for how much damage it deals, taking these factors into consideration again for the minimum and maximum possible roll. 6C) Infections that have spread will roll all infected regions together, as opposed to separate wounds which roll separately. 6D) For example, and by no means a finalized set of figures: A player who is Prone to Illness with a First Aid skill of 7 is treating a Deadly infection that has spread from their hand to their lower arm with Anitbiotics, but has not sterilized or cleaned the wound and has been using unsterilized bandages for the last 3 hours would look something like this, potentially, maybe, I'm not good at math: Start with 125% to take damage on a roll from Deadly infections. First Aid skill of 7 reduces this chance by 56% (8% per point), 69% (nice) is the result, THEN: Using an Unsterilized Bandage (as opposed to a dirty bandage) reduces this chance by an additional 5%, 64% is the result, (using no bandage would increase the chance by 5%, using a dirty bandage imposes no change, using a Sterilized bandage would reduce the chance by 15%) THEN: Using antibiotics reduces the chance to take damage by an additional 10%, 54% is the result. THEN: Prone to Illness multiplies the new chance to take damage by 1.5x, 81% is the result. THEN: The wound hasn't been 'properly' treated for the last 3 hours, add a flat 2% increase for every 2 hours this has gone on. The result is 83% (85% after the next hour.) The wound is unsterilized, Add a flat 10% increase to the chance of taking damage. The final result is a 93% chance to take damage, pretty much exclusively calculated based on player input, skills, and traits. If the result is to end in a decimal, it rounds up and down as per standard rounding rules. It may seem unfair that someone with level 7 First Aid has such a high chance to take damage from the wound, but lower ranks of First Aid would have pretty much guaranteed taking damage in this scenario, and the player is not using several tools available (poultices, sterilizing wounds and bandages) to further reduce this chance or prevent it outright. Essentially, if you know how to treat a wound, you could knock even Deadly infections down to a manageable level without being able to 'properly' treat it, at least for long enough to find a solution. A similar process is followed for how much damage is taken from that roll, doubled as the infection has spread to one other region. I don't know what the health values in the game look like so I don't know what numbers would be reasonable. The idea is that mild infections could kill in 1.5-2 weeks when ignored if they never progress, deadly infections could kill in 2-5 days if completely ignored assuming that they never regress or get better on their own. 7) Severe and Deadly infections can come back if the player does not continue antibiotic treatment for a couple of days after the infection clears up, even if the wound is healed. This is intended to happen maybe 1/10 times, but often enough that using antibiotics for a couple of days is still the preferable option if resources allow it. Using poultice treatments on open wounds (such as Wild Garlic) make this even less likely.

Alright this may sound like the dumbest thing you've ever heard, but it's not mentioned in the post: Have you checked task manager to make sure that there isn't an executable for Project Zomboid already running in your background processes? I've had issues in the past where a game "closes" but doesn't fully close out the executable. You can also potentially fix this by restarting your PC if you can't find it in background processes. If you have tried this, then I'm sorry but that's all the advice I've got. You've done pretty much everything I can think of. Hugo's advice might also work, running it directly from your files could help, and posting your console.txt would definitely be a big help.

I think that when NPCs are added there will be more of a sense of competition and urgency to looting.

This is quite possibly the pettiest nitpick I've ever seen, and 99.9% of people wouldn't even notice, but I'm absolutely here for it. Seconded!

Long story short, there appears to be some work going on with car interiors judging from some of the assets in the current game that simply don't spawn in the actual playspace, (and there may also be some devlogs I missed). With this said, I'd be interested in seeing some features related to those car interiors: Zombies inside of cars: Either buckled or unbuckled, buckled zombies being unable to move and easy to deal with (for example, near-guaranteed headstabs with knives and spears), unbuckled zombies being able to crawl between seats, smash windows to get out, slip out of open doors and windows, etc. Thus to loot some cars, you may have to lure a zombie out, or kill and remove them if they're stuck inside. If you're really foolhardy, maybe you could even leave a zombie buckled into the back seat opposite of the driver's side as a little road trip companion. Corpses inside of cars: Similar concept as above. Corpses that are either dead players, part of the world generation as environmental events, whether it be car crashes, survivors who've crashed or killed themselves with some loot in the car and on their person, etc etc, that the player has to drag out of the car to make use of the seats they occupy. Bonus points if these 'corpses' can be sleeper zombies that wake up when you start trying to mess with them or attack them with no aiming outline until they're awake (even when using it for all weapons), but are still able to be attacked. Loot inside of cars: Also pretty simple, loot inside of car seats or bags sitting on seats. After the exclusion zone was put up it's very likely that lots of people would have packed their necessities into bags and tossed them into the seats of their car. Guns, clothes, canned goods, non-perishables, toys, and just other everyday essentials and luxuries that people would want to take with them. Even if not in bags, loose stuff found inside of cars visible from the outside of the car would be awesome, and give more of a purpose to wrecked or low condition cars left on the side of the road, as well as serve as a nice little treat to get now and again when looking for cars with keys or gas.

Fully agree that weapons need another pass. Most weapons are damn near identical to one another aside from a really minor damage increase/decrease. On short blunts, for example, the vast majority of weapons will always kill in the same number of hits regardless of your Short Blunt skill, with the only exceptions being the absolute weakest and absolute strongest examples. Weapons in general need some kind of pass to give them a purpose outside of just looking different from one another, the slight variation in weight and durability is not enough to justify having a bunch of weapons that do essentially the same damage but otherwise perform nearly identically.

There are a few mods that already aim to do this, like Progressive Character Creation, though they're pretty much just based on a linear "time survived" metric. Also, PCC is really buggy, and can cause you to permanently spawn with no skills of any kind regardless of how you spent your trait points, but at least you get to keep the trait's bonuses if they have any that aren't just a skill increase. Would be very cool to have your character's actions influence the number of trait points gained.

That isn't the best plush, but I'll buy it for charity.

It literally doesn't matter I'm not showing you a video of me lmfao

Yeah let me just dox myself for you

You can trip while hopping a fence while jogging or sprinting. Also, I weigh 250, don't consider myself particularly athletic, and I can absolutely spring a short fence without tripping. Nimble is already in the game. I do not like this suggestion.

Where is the typo? That all looks right to me?

As far as thoughts go: Wandering hordes should always be a thing, but they shouldn't start out (or end) in 2000+, over 2000 is literally impossible to deal with, and may not even be possible for the engine to render. 2000 zombies is enough to fill an entire map square and some change, possibly more. You can see this effect in towns, honk your horn, see who comes. You may think that you're being trailed by easily 300 zombies, but when all is said and done you only really killed 80-100 tops. It's really difficult for us as humans to accurately gauge how many people are in a crowd, hence why people tend to over-estimate. So for example, week 1, a wandering horde if it were to appear, should only start around 15-20 zombies, ramping up by a factor of maybe 5% every week, capping out at a reasonable number. We should also keep in mind that just being steamrolled by something you have literally zero chance of dealing with even if you were to have every bullet or gadget on the entire map is maybe not all that fun for players. Most hordes should come in a number that it is still possible for someone to defend their homes if they're clever and well-equipped. (Keyword, most) The amount of noise you make should also probably have some kind of factor, like a buildup of heat. If you do a lot of shooting, honking horns, etc then the hordes should be larger, if you lay low for a period then they should be smaller on average. Additionally, these wandering hordes would almost certainly repopulate any area they pass through as they shed numbers here and there, creating a new challenge outside of the immediate threat of being overrun, it's another thing to keep in mind when we're discussing how challenging the initial horde attacks should be. I was thinking hordes could be tracked in a similar way to zombie migration now, since we've already got a system for it. The sadistic AI director would only need to nudge them in your direction, and control how many zeds the horde picks up or sheds.

You have said exactly nothing that I didn't already understand

And yet still worth the effort. If we dismiss every single suggestion based on "it'd take a long time" then why bother making a game at all? It takes a long time to make.

Lmao reddit

Actually, the energy of the heat expanding inside of the bottle makes it incredibly easy to break a lit molotov cocktail after just a few seconds of burning, just be careful not to burn yourself or hold it too long or it'll burst all over you (speaking from experience)

That is the exact opposite of what I said, I said that it doesn't fit with the game's representation of zombies, but that anything can be "zombie-like" because of the huge diversity in zombie media depicting all different kinds of them. I.E, zombies being relatively intelligent isn't inherently going against their nature, but it does go against how the game depicts them (I.E slow, mindless shells that don't think about anything, much less about self preservation.) I think that making zombies move a little bit faster, and making it harder for fire to kill zombies or spread between them in open spaces would be the best middle ground. They react to the stimulus of you know, being on fire, in a way that doesn't contradict their lore, making it harder to avoid them as well as making it harder to light up large groups by proxy. Therefore creative solutions would still be best, but it wouldn't make throwing a molly at a group in the open completely worthless given the right situation.